Teaching the language love

• The job market is becoming increasingly competitive and globalised (more than 300 million Chinese students are learning English, with 100,000 of them studying in America).
• Language learning gives kids an extra string to their career bows. This applies to kids opting for just about any discipline: from law, economics or fine art to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (the STEM disciplines).
• Employers are diversifying their workforce to appeal to broader consumer segments. With two equally qualified candidates, 50% of employers (in a US survey) would be more inclined to hire the bilingual candidate. More attractive jobs require bilingual skills, a trend that is certain to increase.
• It is becoming increasingly important for government employees, intelligence analysts and soldiers to speak foreign languages. The U.S. State Department offers Americans large incentives to learn “Super Critical Needs Languages”. Students with high-demand languages enjoy advantages when applying for government positions.
• Language learning enhances young people’s communication skills and gives them a real appreciation of the essence of language. It helps them express themselves better in their own language. And it helps to develop other important learning areas, such as memory function, abstract thinking and the ability to understand the communication needs of other people.
• We’re handicapping our young people if we fail to prepare them with the international perspective and globally oriented skill set that they’ll need to succeed. We need to help kids understand that having a second language will open doors that otherwise would remain closed to them.
• Young people often don’t see the relevance of language learning.
• Innovative and imaginative teaching methods can sparks kids’ interest in languages.
• Foreign language study is widely seen as an unaffordable luxury. Britain and the US are accused of having a dismissive and short-sighted attitude to languages.
• The message being sent to our kids is that having a second language is inconsequential. A generation of school children risks being left monolingual because of a looming crisis in language teaching.
• Every pupil should learn languages until the age of 16, not necessarily at a specialised level. We need people with conversational ability: police officers, hotel receptionists, transport workers (and, to judge from the “Parlez-vous” article, telephone operators working for public bodies).
• Britain is sliding towards a “humiliating decline” in its contribution to world affairs because of dwindling foreign language teaching.
• The US and the UK require skills to communicate in other languages and cultures, the ability to talk and work with peers in all areas of international importance.
• Neither the US nor the UK can compete if they cannot communicate.

I think language teachers do a great job but struggle to get their message across to pupils who are too young and inexperienced to see the point of learning French verbs and vocabulary. Educational outreach is one way for language professionals to help, by giving kids real-life examples of people who earn their living from and love working with languages (on which point, see – and vote in – our job satisfaction poll).

I’ll be writing in later posts about ways in which language professionals (translators, web-editors, journalists, copywriters… people working with their own, just as much as with foreign, languages) can collaborate with schools to promote language learning. It needn’t take up much time, and those beleaguered language teachers will greatly appreciate the effort.

With thanks to hyperlingo / @hyperlingo for pointing out many of the above articles!

By Marian Dougan